Question on setup of MSA2000

[WayneL]

Please forgive my ignorance. First time working with a SAN of any kind, and no documentation. I'm setting up a MSA2000 (fitted with 4 140GB SAS drives, dual AJ754A controllers) connected to two servers running Windows Server 2003 R2 and connected to the MSA2000 via SAS cables and HBAs. I've went into the web interface and configured a virtual disk as RAID 5 with two volumes that are presented to all hosts.

Both servers see the volumes, and I've configured them with drive letters in disk management. The problem I'm having is I thought that both servers would see the same data on the drives (i.e. I create a file on one server on volume1, but it does not appear on the same drive on the second server). Is my thinking wrong, or have I configured something incorrectly?

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

[Patrick Terlisten · Accepted solution]

Hello Wayne,

this is not possible. You can't share a NTFS volume with two servers, NTFS isn't a cluster filesystem and it doesn't provide such locking mechanisms.

Best regards,
Patrick

[marsh_1]

hi,

to follow up patricks comments , without some form of shared filesystem you will corrupt the data on these disks as without it there is no way to coordinate the locks on the data on the disks - only allow access to each lun from one server.

hth

[WayneL]

Patrick and Mark, Thanks for the explanation. I was looking at setting up a cluster server on this setup (and obviously this will be my first time). Will this work with MSCS on Server2003R2? After setting up the virtual disk and a volume to be the shared drive, does cluster administrator take care of setting up the drive with the clustered filesystem?

[marsh_1]

hi,

the msa2000 is supported with mscs , AFAIK mscs only supports ownership of any shared resources by one node at a time.

hth

[Uwe Zessin]

Windows NT, 2000, 2003 and 2008 allow for "shared LUNs", but _not_ concurrent NTFS (file system) access from multiple servers.

I've just read today that Windows 2008 R2 will support so-called "Cluster Shared Volumes", but I have not checked if it is limited to HYPER-V environments.

Today, you need to work-around it by using file shares for the other servers or buy a 3rd-party solution like HP's PolyServe product.